Transformation and automation hand in hand across 2019

While organizations will relook at their structure and job roles to enable successful digital transformation across 2019, other key activity areas will be automation of customer experiences and the supply chain, explains Paul Potgieter, Managing Director – UAE,Dimension Data

Paul Potgieter, Managing Director – UAE, Dimension Data

As
organizations get moving on the digital transformation road map, they may
abruptly find themselves running more on a bumpy dirt track rather than a
Formula One race course with expected high-speed pit-stops. The learnings from
this experience are sometimes hard to accept. One of the key reasons for the
bumpy track is that existing organizational structures are often incompatible
with the requirements of delivering digital experiences to customers.
Organizations need to take a deep breath and start relooking at their structure
from the point of view of the customer rather than traditional departmental
silos and legacy job functions.

One
of the key changes likely to happen across 2019 is that organizations moving
down the path of digital transformation will restructure to bring in
flexibility so that they can refocus on what the customer wants. Digital
technologies will be leveraged to enhance the customer experience and project
teams will work together to rebuild the organization around customer data,
innovative experiences, revamped business processes, and redesigned job roles.
This will help the organization to move forward rather than face resistance,
similar to fitting a square peg into a round hole.

Other
than organizational structure, another area that will need revamp in 2019 will
be the approach around generating, accessing and analyzing customer data.
Organizations beginning their digital transformation exercise will quickly
realize that they have a lot of data that they do not need, and very little
data that they do need, to begin their journey into understanding customer
insights. Organizations will need to build new processes to generate the data
that they do need and also build new structures to aid in the analysis of that
data.

In
order to build their repositories of insightful and valuable, customer centric
data across 2019, organizations will be successful this time around by
investing in the Internet of Things. By investing in sensors, devices,
applications, connected core and edge networks, across entire business
processes and supply chains, organizations will begin to realize how to
generate their return on investments through customer data aggregation and
analytics.

Not
only will organizations be more successful in 2019 by investing in the Internet
of Things, for their own data analytics, but they will also begin to see the
value in blending into their data, repositories from third party data sources.
This may include data from open data platforms maintained by national
government agencies such as weather, population demographics, urban statistics,
vehicular movements as well as open data repositories from global agencies. By
building correlations between their own data and other third-party data
sources, organizations will better model customer behavior and responses in a
predictive manner, yielding better return on investments and net new revenue
sources.

Successful
availability of data across the entire customer experience and business supply
chain will give organizations the confidence to open up their inventory and
delivery in a real time manner to suppliers, partners and end-customers. As
suppliers, partners and end-customers get access to not only current levels of
product and stock availability but also future levels in a predictive manner,
they will also begin to engage in a more proactive manner. This enhanced level
of supply chain forecasting with predictive demand levels, combined with ERP,
CRM, artificial intelligence, robotics and automation, promises to be one of
the exciting new trends in 2019.

Automation
using robotic processes will drive huge gains across 2019 as machine learning,
neural networks and artificial intelligence are progressively added to the
complete end to end of business processes. Geographical compliance challenges
coupled with market behavior will be a key driver for the adoption of more and
more automation driving predictive behavior of demand levels for a product or
service. Other drivers for the adoption of robotic process automation will be
the ability to reduce costs of operation, enhanced support levels for customer
demands, and ability to deliver personalized experiences effectively.

As
organizations begin to make progress in their digital transformation exercise
in 2019, another key learning and realization for them will be the availability
of prebuilt digital technology services, frameworks, and platforms. As much as
possible, digital transformation adopters need to reach out and access service
partners who have prepared such tools and building blocks for them. There is
little need for such organizations dabbling in the early stages of digital
transformation to start building the blocks themselves or start tackling the
complexities of creating such platforms.

It is
far easier to leave the challenges and complexities of building and managing
the digital technology components of 2019 to vendors and their service partners
and focus on making progress in the organization’s digital transformation
objectives. Organizations adopting an active role of buying-in managed
technology services, will find themselves making accelerated progress in their
journeys. They will also find it easier to invest and build scale around
pre-tested, compliant and secure platforms, that are reliable building blocks
for their onward transformation journeys. Success in 2019 appears to be more
predictive than before.